The game I made for this week's Ludum Dare is called Lunar Limit. It's an early 1980s-esque arcade shooter about blasting space ships and dodging bullets. In the game, you're in control of a miniature version of planet earth; "Mini Earth", and must use your faithful satellite; "The Moon Cannon", to survive.

Controls:

DPad - Move Earth

A/B - Rotate moon

Select - Use Powerup

Let me know if you find any serious bugs before I submit it to the Ludum Dare website.

Interesting way to aim, and I remember that "infinite bullets" idea. The mini earth is cute.

I like it.

As for bugs, after the PPU warmup I notice there is one frame of "random" (uninitialized) sprites before the game starts. Seems to indicate that your OAM buffer in RAM is not initialized. If it's just that, it's probably inconsequential, but if you're not initializing the rest of RAM you might want to.

It also seems that you can pass through ships (but not bullets). That's probably not a bad design, just I was surprised by it.

I wrote a short article on the danmaku.nes bullet code for the Ludum Dare blog. It's written for non-nesdev people and there's a bit of hyperbole and bombast in there to make it sound more interesting/technical than it really is, but if you're interested here's a link:

As for bugs, after the PPU warmup I notice there is one frame of "random" (uninitialized) sprites before the game starts. Seems to indicate that your OAM buffer in RAM is not initialized. If it's just that, it's probably inconsequential, but if you're not initializing the rest of RAM you might want to.

I'll be honest, when I first saw the danmaku demo using nametables for bullets, I didn't see what the purpose of it was, especially with the non-smooth movement. But here it totally makes sense; the shakiness actually helps the enemy projectiles to stand out, and making the background out of sprites solves the problem of not having any nametables to work with. The added camera drift completes the effect nicely. Color me impressed!

This game is good I like this game. However, I have some ideas of altering the scoring a bit (so they aren't always a multiple of ten):

If you collect heart when you already have nine lives you can earn three points.

If you collect alphabets that you already have then you can earn one point.

If you activate "B" to destroy everything then you can earn one point.

The battery version that can save the high score can also be the possible idea, to more easily to keep track of high score. (I think my highest score is something a bit more than 09000 although I did not actually keep track of it.)

Also, why it says eleven games even though is only one game and why it says VCS even though it is actually NES?

There is also a bug sometimes the hearts and alphabets will seem to teleport to a different location rather than moving properly.

It wasn't really completely nonsensical -- The VCS (Atari) boxes listed the number of game variations. Many Atari games had quite a few game modes -- sometimes as simple as adjusting difficulty or enemy speeds, but sometimes having major feature changes between versions (Space Invaders, for example, had modes with invisible enemies, bunkers or no bunkers, 1 or 2 players, enemy bullets that could move horizontally (or not), and more). Once you had all the permutations of those features, you could easily come up with 112 variations. I'll admit that calling them separate "games" was a stretch, but it did make some level of sense.

I also wondered, when seeing your box, how to access the other 10 game modes.

Many Atari games had quite a few game modes -- sometimes as simple as adjusting difficulty or enemy speeds, but sometimes having major feature changes between versions (Space Invaders, for example, had modes with invisible enemies, bunkers or no bunkers, 1 or 2 players, enemy bullets that could move horizontally (or not), and more). Once you had all the permutations of those features, you could easily come up with 112 variations. I'll admit that calling them separate "games" was a stretch, but it did make some level of sense.

It made as much sense as 9999-in-1 Famicom multicarts that have about 40 unique. At least Action 52 was more honest.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 5 guests

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot post attachments in this forum